self-taught artist QIN TIANZHU was born in 1952 in chengdu city, sichuan province, china. he is now a member of the chinese artist asssociation and a professional artist in sichuan poetry and calligraphy. QIN has created a unique artistic style with beautiful compositions and classic coloring that won him awards in china and japan. his brushstrokes look so effortless thrown on paper and his stylized birds are just stunning. during my time on MULAN the definition of POETIC SIMPLICITY was created, – here is an artist whose artwork truly belongs in that category, more than anybody else.

warner brothers restaured some of the FLEISCHER SUPERMAN-SHORTS and posted them on YouTube. on cartoon brew you can read more about it. the shorts look like brandnew and inspired me to recreate one pan-background, more will follow. I chose a pan to start with from the SUPERMAN short SHOWDOWN, released october 1942. it shows a beautifully watercolor-painted apartment at night, with different lightsources from a fireplace, lamps and moonlight. have a look below

to show you a better example of a long panning background from an animated short – here is a recreated BG from disney’s CLOCK CLEANERS. directed by BEN SHARPSTEEN it was released october 15, 1937. the painting technique here is watercolor, what means that you get the darker tones by applying dozens of layers of kind of dirty water on top of each other. the same painting technique was later used in most of the first feature films as well. many years later disney traditional painters copied the same technique to create the beautiful BG’s for LILO AND STITCH. it takes a lot of training to paint like that, but the results in case you master the technique are stunning. the technique the woody woodpecker BG-artist used was different. he painted with gouache color, but he tried to make it look like watercolor. unfortunately the wrong way, by adding more water to the gouache color you can make it look transparent. apparently some painters at that time tried that, avoiding the time-consuming addition of dozens of layers, and just do it in one. if you don’t really know what you are doing, like adjusting the colors and values very careful, and control your brushstrokes, it looks like a disaster.

ABOUT ME

my name is hans bacher, – I work as production designer in the animation film industry. for the last 45 years I lived and worked in duesseldorf, london, paris, los angeles, singapore and tokyo. after 7 years of teaching in singapore I am back at my homebase in manila and will spend next year between a new assignment in shanghai and traveling europe